Regional ancestry bands:
working on a visual collection of clustered Half-Identical Regions.

Freitag, 11. Februar 2011

Project description

Each new match in „Relative Finder“ opens up a line of possible connections towards a common recent ancestor somewhere back in 4, 7, 10 generations. RF was released by 23andme in autumn 2009, binding a small community of about 30000 genetoholics together in a facebook-like social network. Very few of them ended up to actually proof such a genetic connection in a traditional genealogical way, most are still full of hope. RF only encompasses half-identical regions (HIR’s) with a genetic distance value of greater than 7 centiMorgan and more than 700 single nucleotid polymorphisms (SNP’s).
Half a year later the users of 23andme could welcome an additional new tool – „Ancestry Finder“, listing also smaller matches between 5 and 7 centiMorgan and all the emigration-, coemigration and immigration countries, our grandfather generation comes from. The computer generated graphic design of AF is rather poor – the tiny chromosomes can only show one match on one spot, all additional clustering matches must stay hidden. And there is no scale!
I wanted to have a visual representation of a chromosome set, giving them an individual face with enough room for hundreds of matches. I therefore created a handle of stylesheet with columns for names, haplogroups and the number of SNP’s (URL).
Collecting ones matches in those stylesheets soon reveals, that most are not spread randomly along all chromosomes, but cluster together or are at least considerably overlapping, while a few others stay relatively isolated. Some of these clusters, especially those of lower cM values tend to start or end exactly at the same positions. Probably they are of a high age due to inversion or yet unknown geneprotecting reasons. Between single matches of perhaps individual interest and such of old pan-european background there are I expect clustering chromosome segments, recombined over and over, thus accumulating region specific pattern and shaping a possible european genetic landscape. This is actually not proven and may turn out to be just a phantom, but anyway a collection of clustering HIR’s should give a valuable background to judge ones matches. All postings around the Regional Ancestry Bands will be displayed in the form of Settings, Reflections and Results.